Dan Udy

My PhD project explores how the theoretical, political, and visual strategies of early HIV/AIDS activism are remediated online. It takes the first ten years of YouTube – 2005 to 2015 – as a framework for analysing broader cultural practices throughout Web 2.0, and shows how The YouTube Decade bookmarks changes in web technology, HIV treatment and prevention, and the study of gender and sexuality that are intertwined. It suggests that queer theory might no longer provide the most effective apparatus for approaching HIV/AIDS in these new contexts, and offers an alternative framework synthesising queer, trans, disability, and critical race studies to think through relations between technology, the body, and disease. It uses ethnography, media archaeology, and close reading to examine case studies ranging from YouTube vlogs and Facebook threads to performance art and amateur pornography, and argues that such remediations of AIDS produce a new form of critical and creative labour I term “theorising bodies”; this embodied discourse intervenes in contemporary queer scholarship to enable new understandings of marginality and difference in the United States, and offers a blueprint for future trajectories of coalitional activist politics.